Improvisations

Riff Off Derek Walcott Lines

The dog sits on my head, crowning my neck with a tail the color of toasted bread. The sun is a brand-new penny that expires early. The poet tries to read the rain making hot beats on a polished oven-top. Patience is the slowing of eyes in milky tears, loving the humanity in a torn circumstance. The night goes over our choices until they’re buried there with spreading flowers. From the earth we end in earth, and the sight of a drunk twilight swinging in the trees is eager to eat itself like a snake at its tail, swallowing its own ending. With mad tears scattered over the blank pages of infinity, we praise each other for learning how to suffer. It we turn into the wind we’re hardly here or here hard.

Riff Off A Page Of Wallace Stevens Lines

I. Like the drunken farewell of what’s anonymous in the madness of a period, I wake to this instant. Anything between what I perceive as me and what spreads into a choir of yesterday’s gathered corners, being imagined is like leaves ruffling the weight of the earth. I was the old solitude of the sun, an island inescapable in the tight head of chaos, cutting what’s departing in suggestions of division. For instance, depending on wide water to blotch what’s beyond it means reestablishing why we’re solemn about what’s sized in neglect. When this room’s empty, it’s not big enough. Yesterday I had it filled, mismanaged. The cup knows nothing of the space it frees. The more strange, the more practice unfolds for a specimen. What happens is the mythology of sharpening the surf on which I turn in wind. If nothing is welcomed, nothing is truly handed.
II. Like the anonymous instant, I’m awake, depending on the sun. What happens is the weight of a period with the madness of a semi-colon. The drunk between is perceived as a spread over what’s neglected. It’s not big enough in an empty room. The volume’s not loud enough in what we practice; let’s push it down the hill, tip our cups over into the wind. For instance, anything like farewell sharpens when the tight head of suggestion is an island.

Two Riffs Off Random Language From Brigitte Byrd

1) Silhouettes punctuate the undergarment of the magnolia during a wheat-colored day. That’s where the two watch the motion of the sun overhead, gesturing to the sounds of glossy leaves. That’s where a gap in the briarpatch has led them down there, contextualized by a Georgian moment extending into one long sentence sliced by commas.

2) Despite an occasional glance at the country, he brimmed his eyes from time to time on the lyricism of the city. There was no stone to disassemble and it did not involve the teeth of his point of view to part the two. There was a whole landscape to the beat of this otherwise unthinkable evening. The effect was the shade of neon and, on the other hand, 21st Century kharma. He adopted sorrow at the turn of his feet in sand, clutching at a tower made of grass: a dwelling dwindling upward.

Riff off Random Language from BH Fairchild

It felt like my skin muttered around my body while I walked toward the anxiety of speech, toward the moment when some far off promise carried me to the beginning of being here. Over the water I watched the great hands of moss grasping at something that’s between what’s there and may not be, like memory, like I was a listener to the end of wind pulling itself away from settling down. When my body steadied on the study of the deck, I was heavier than humidity, stomaching recollection in what I called once yet knew was always multiplied. Why pitter toward an exclamation when our eyes are round periods shawled in the aesthetic of marbles. I packed bread for the geese that day and could almost hear it sit before the water circled out to the bank.

From Brigitte Byrd: "On hanging onto a denouement she said If there is no end to this story I shall tie another flower to the narrative.”

My Riff:

When reading the close, all he could think was, I could hang this on the door for the rest of my days.

From Brigitte Byrd: “On ending in general he said Time is running out if you want to buy a horse and your words have swarmed the streetlight.”

My Riff:

Every time he began his rewrite, his little boy came into his office, squealing, Time is running out! I hear the icecream truck!

From Brigitte Byrd: “On finally making it to the end she said Can you see a dog jumping through a hoop of ribbons?”

My Riff:

By the pond, she asked her lover, Can you see the bottom down there?
He didn't answer with anything but the distance of his eyes.

From Byrd: “On sealing the deal on a domestic circus he said But you can't have a horse in Boston any more than you can go out of your mind.

My Riff:

At a ballgame, the pitcher looked like a crane who had lost his mind.

From Byrd: “On making a stone smother the sound of a star he said I understand each word but I don't understand them together”

My Riff:

He made a knocking sound on a rock with his hiking stick—the same one with which he beat down foot-threats. It was like he was rapping on the door of the under-earth.

From Byrd: “On painting a red flower on her dress it was something that did not happen.

My Riff:

He tried painting a french bulldog on the side of his tee-shirt. It turned out resembling a fat, sobbing devil.

Riff Off Brigitte Byrd's “Going Around the Country with Full Orchestra”

The sound of the flowered rug indicated a shift in perspiration. The water shot down from the ceiling, a fire tore down the other side of the room. The man scrawled on the rug couldn't taste what was hot beside him. He hummed what he considered obvious under his breath, with eyes closed.

Riff Off Brigitte Byrd's “Lyric Occupation”

She said, I'll read you an exchange between movement and manipulation. Each participant suffered a radical choice—one dealing with the illusion of certainty. The lack of balance didn't change. Neither did their wringing hands that monitored their acknowledgments.

Riff Off Brigitte Byrd's “After Gazing at the Rain”

There was no way out, like kneecaps under braces. His hand was under his momentous vision; her hand was under his. She watched his perception as if it were half untied, burning with what the body read as high definition.

Riff Off Brigitte Byrd's “Perhaps There Was No Concern”

For a moment she had the notion of swingset, but her daughter removed this philosophical speculation by motioning a swimmingpool. Their backyard has now shifted from the smells of coffee to those of young wet skin. She crosses a leg with the other, in the kitchen, smelling chlorine through the windows. She can catch the legs of her daughter above water—the legs that would have swung her. Now her daughter is on the lip, scrambling up toward the door. Mom, she screams, I held my breath for as many seconds as your age.

Riff off Byrd's “A Brittle Day Passed By”

When language ajars a drawer full of nothing to say, he says, there is something in the opening—plots with characters in a notebook, narratives of ourselves in adaptation. After leaving his lyricism to the commotion of the sun architecturing morning, I am myself, contemplating coffee. The porch is dressed in a yellow stocking of pollen. My cigarette is a prologue to asking myself about his answer. He was right, but he left out how notebooks aren't the only places we're in the shape of adaptation.

Riff Off "Parenthetical"

Tomorrow has a lot of pencils - a blind world that swells without pause. I wish I could undress the question of nothing, or question nothing about that wish. Tomorrow, there's a lot to pull shadows from, from which to overwhelm our stories. Before we pause, I come here with a white curtain drenched in paint, flapping silence out of a spoken world where we park but never break, breaking parts of what's already broken. I wish I could spell nothing in a pause. Tomorrow is a blade of grass overwheming the sidewalk. Before we pencil the silence of yesterday, let us question the noise here.

Riff Off "Charlie Brown in the Dead of Night"

WFrom Bill Knott:

"I am a messenger sent to find
the genius in everyone here,
because it alone is the true
recipient of what I carry—
it alone can read the code
this note was written in: it alone
is the genius in everyone
but me, which is why I alone
can bear to bring it to you."

My Riff:

I am restless in trying to find a messenger,
a genius in everyone here I can bear for.
Because words alone are only true
if everyone is still alone and bearing
together for our genius. It’s like a swing
peeking the length of its chains
with no one on it. If we read the code,
we ask who made it; we wrestle with only
an idea, we chew the noose tied to the tree
we uprooted ourselves. “Everybody”
we become leery toward, its idea,
how we come to know it. All day long
I’m restless for a messenger to meet
me in the playground where slides
trail down beyond the water-logged
docks, down to a sand we can both
scrape against our palms.


From Weise:

"Despite"

At six in the morning / the woodpecker took / to the tree, the man from / last night slack-jawed / & asleep. The leg would / not slide on & would not / slide on. He said he rather / liked it, could / kiss despite it. I know / that word. It means / the desire to hurt someone.

My Riff:


“We like them because they remind us that we still eat, we’re okay”
“a body that waits for her on a coat hanger”
“I know that word. It means the desire to hurt someone”
“She has found the backs of his knees”
“You say I’m obsessed with bodies; they are nothing, they are everything.”
“The only time the doctors asked was when they wanted a piece of research.”
“If you’re handicapped, prove it, he says, shining his light between my legs”
“This is my skin, my body and I am too alive, electric, meat and metal”
“At one time, we were our answers”
“What did my body mean to say as an aside?”
“Why are you writing what you are when you know I do not like it?”

My Riff:

At one time, my skin was proven to be exactly what it is. They say an obsession with bodies leads to nothing, to everything we can use in words. We’re okay, you say, while trying to remind me that I’m electric. You are too alive: also alive, overly alive, maybe, which is all the life there ever is if we are our own answers. My skin and yours are meat we do not eat. Between our legs, well, light usually doesn’t shine there, you say. Let’s move away, for a piece of research, for an experiment concerning the backs of all notions we only look at frontwards. That means, as you well know, the desire to know what we’re reminded of, to know why we want doctors for mapping out our minds, for finding what we already are: skin and words and obsessions with exactly what we one time moved away from, only to eat pieces of means that shoot to frayed ends.

From Kathy Fagan: “Like someone with his thumb on your forehead, like the light that hardly ever happens anymore every year about this time”

My Riff:

In that plane, sinus pressure in my face moved above my nose, pressing like thumbs into my forehead; and the glints of sun off the wings outside were those which hardly happen this time of year. It was winter—an attendant bent to give me ginger-ale. In that plane, the bathrooms didn’t have mirrors. I couldn’t see my face, couldn’t make out the pain stretching under my skin. I hung my head in my hands like I was trying to smell my waist, but I desired to be wind flipping over the wings without threat of hanging on. I recalled old migraines I now considered abandoned: the shredding apart of what’s in tact behind my eyes when the sun used to weigh down on top of my hair as a child. I no longer take medicine for that. Back at my seat I emptied the ginger-ale. I had to but they next one, they told me. Without change I closed my eyes with my head turned as if glaring out the window.

From Kathy Fagan: “The old woman who is always talking tells the old man who is never listening, I visited the old house today.”

My Riff:

In an old house, an old woman and her husband tell each other they’re listening when neither do. With such ill ears they must yell to be heard, and days ago they did away with voices that carry. She’s begun speaking out-loud nearly all the time to no one particular. He’s quit talking to her or himself, so she’s surprised to see him situating his lips at the sun behind the blinds. He sees her; she slides her arms around his chest from behind as he pulls the draw-string; they watch morning together without words, then shuffle in one motion outside without suggesting it to each other. He thinks he hears her speak on their sidewalk—it’s the wind rustling through the bushes. Or so he imagines, as he watches them scrape against the wood of their house.

From Kathy Fagan: “All the roses in the world then bloomed at once for me, and faded, / like a light switched on, then quickly off. Thus I understood / the mythical contrasts, the secular hum, in which memory resides.”

My Riff: All the poses in the fading bloom are like understood lights flickering on and off—so quick you can’t tell when the switch is up or down. The mythical concerts of memories, the secular worlds of everything holy, are thus residing once in multiplication. I once understood the flicker of memories, now I know they are face to face with a multiplied world we can only make art out of. It’s like another’s finger flicking the backs of hands until blood; only the hand doesn’t bleed but the finger does. The hand’s posed only for a split-switch, only for the finger to spring up and down from a place we can’t tell, a place like a memory, a mythical residence where I once understood everything holy. Maybe I still do. Maybe I know I knew, or knew I know now.

From Angie Estes: “Light, / when it leaves / the air, is the color of blood / that has entered a vein”

My Riff: Writing, when it dreams the air, is the brother of blood that has splintered a vein. Light, when it breathes bare, is the wonder of mud that has begun to disappear. They used to say a light spread itself to the end of every word written, and that every spoken word disappears before it begun. The mud of dreams, then, is the air of blood. Until the end of every living word, there’s a spoken beginning to a light disappearing; but a disappearing light is already written in our veins. Not forever. Not when forever is written only in wonder. Not when together we’re knitted to each other like veins in their matrix. They used to pray for light to spread on every written word. I do too, but I don’t pray to anything separate from anything else—like a written word spreading across a matrix of disappearing wonder. Entering into our veins we can see light leaving the air the color of all there is.

From Trethewey: “the store that sells / souvenirs, tokens of history long buried”

My Riff:



From Trethewey: “The picture we took that first morning, / the front yard a beautiful, strange place – / why on the back has someone made a list / of our names, the date, the event: nothing / of what’s inside”

My Riff Off Her:



Riff Off John Olson’s “Why I Never Wear Suspenders”

I admire the shape of legs, the strain of ankles, the tendons on the tops of feet. Legs are dualism making footnotes on the same sidewalk. The faucet in the middle of the night sleeps with its head full of hair, mixtures of little to do and dripping water—writing poems to its own tendencies. The external world we call home is a seeming oblivion that ultimately means an applause, a clapping of hands from all images of ourselves on a wall of a place we know nothing about. When I read parables, I think they are eggs made of beatitudes, like the most acknowledged sometimes, or the ideal nothing in an understood throat bellowing for transcendence. This is why I always punctuate myself when I reach someone’s legs. The smashed perception reflected back to a self-evident nosebleed. Why would we pay little attention to something so queasy?


From Sandra Meek: "as if what we're falling from isn't grace, isn't what, a century ago, the newly arrived believed they could recreate"



From Sandra Meek: "From my mother: self is just what doesn't leave you."

From Carolyne Forsche:

“It is either the beginning or the end / of the world, and the choice is ourselves / or nothing”

My Riff Off Her:

It is either the end of ourselves or the beginning of the world, and we have nothing but both, which doesn’t exclude the other, the self we beckoned for, nor the conditionings happening to our other selves elsewhere. In my old youth, I wandered around a neighborhood of nothing but children—even our parents. And maybe it’s still that way. Maybe our worlds are created out of fear for a new beginning—the genesis of everything speaking to itself. In summers there, my father taught me to mow the lawn while older kids smoldered their insides with cigarettes by the sewer drain: the hole where we later explored our first sense of real garbage. My neighbor had a small camper that hugged the edge of her parent’s property. I spent nights there with her, younger by a bouquet of years, watching movies where the teenagers find their own individuality. We depended on each other for summers on porches rocking to our mother’s cooking. For six months straight I shot hoops, waiting for scouts to rustle from the woods begging me to play for their team. When I didn’t have my neighbor or myself to tell stories of the future to, I spoke to those woods and the scouts who couldn’t find their way out of them.


From John Poch: “For instance, time’s crossroads times zero equals infinity.”

My Riff Off Poch:

For an instant, I thought time crossed into zero. But then I realized an instant is infinity to some people. To others, though, a crossroad, down the street, where the train roars, is all the time we’d ever need. For instance, what if zero equals itself, and itself equals time? The crossroads where past meets future, or, yesterday tomorrows today, we can be sure, maybe, that all the time in the world is equal to itself. There are infinite queries, queens of times we go down the street to see the train, and others other than our self can equal yesterday’s today. Tomorrow, I already realized an instant. To some that sounds crossed. To others that sounds like a train zipping down all the world. Maybe we can meet the needs of our own roars simply by timing ourselves, then laughing about it. Maybe time is accumulated in laughs, in times we sound each other off into alreadys. I’m already confused, I think. Or maybe I’ve already realized what that equals: a train dumping zero into a zip-lock bag. Ah, let’s zip-lock time’s crossroads, zeroing in on them altogether in one instant.

From John Poch:

“I hover above my sonnet, my handicap / apparent, arson on the brain, and practice / denying my death, patient as practice practice”

My Riff Off Poch:

I hover above my practice, where death is a handicapped sonnet, where arson is considered patient and brains deny their own amount. I practice my own handicaps and handicap my arson brain into one more hovering, more apparently considered. If we consider how many sonnets it takes to build a patient death, think of the amount of bridges that’ll hover the river on fire. Think about considering a death-sonnet for a moment—no, make dead that consideration for a moment of your own. More apparent then is practiced practice, the un-handicapped parking in spaces excluded for the ill. Patience is a virtue they say; well be patient for that virtue to park in your own illness. The space of a bridge on fire amounts to thinking about a patient sonnet. Because to write one is to build a consideration, and to do that, well, we have to practice dying to ourselves for a moment.

A Knock On The Door by James Tate

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.

Strangers From My Backyard (first draft – riff off Tate)



From Robert Hass:

“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.”

My Riff Off Hass:

All the new thinking is about resemblances.
In this it is like the old idea, for example, that each clarity
Erases itself with a luminous idea. That the wood-faced
Presence of tragedy falls from itself in worlds of notion.
The world where no one thing doesn’t correspond with what it signifies,
Where a word divides itself in a bramble of thoughts about
loss.

Riff Off Frank O’Hara’s

"He has banged into your wall of air, your hubris."
He bangs into his head, his air wall, his hubris.
His wall of hubris bangs into itself.
He hangs onto his huffs for air,
Mist beliefs, walls of nothing but banging heads.
He’s built, huffing, hanging his head over the wall.
He has hung from a wall in a hammock,
Banging the air with his feet, believing in hubris only too close to a door.
He chokes on nothing but air, and air that hangs his head, nonetheless.
None of the lesser beliefs decorate the stunned walls.
Nothing but a wall itself can hang from a poking world of heavy patterns.
Built for something, but nothing hangs its own head-wall, a road new
With ancient feet. A patterned belief in a standing world, built for new roads,
For stunned air, for decorations and holy meals.

From Bruce Bond: "A boy lays his hands on the backs / of his mother's as they float / over the keys, over the startled / water of a dead man's music"

Lydia Davis’s “The Mother”:

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

My Riff Off Her:

The boy wrote a play. “But how will you get anyone to act this out,” asked his friend. The boy built a warped stage from plywood. “But that’s not nearly big enough,” his friend said. “It’ll be too crunched.” The boy found scraps around the house for costumes. “How will you know what will fit when you don’t who’s acting yet,” his friend nagged. Then the boy said: “You’re missing the point. It’s the thrill of a show that may not ever even happen that’s got me preparing.”

From Adrian Matejka’s “Texas Hold’em…”:

“This is what happens / when you can live half in / and half out of the drink.”

My Riff Off Him

Hey, here’s my napkin you can live in halfway, and when you’re halfway out you can call me for a drink. Because this is what happens when you give half of what you don’t have. In fact, this napkin is what happens when it’s half-damp with a drink you never ordered. You can call yourself when you live halfway down the dried-up stream. Hey, here’s a drink. Now you can have something for your napkin. We can meet halfway down the stream to drink our orders. And what you don’t have, well don’t worry what half-happens. All we have to call on is down and dry, or maybe damp with happenings we never ordered. I can call myself you halfway down the facts. And you call me damp if you drink what I ordered here. In fact, let’s just throw our napkins because they’re more than halfway down the stream already. We can meet them later. For now let’s turn on streams of lamp-light and let maybe happen. We can drink the lamp halfway down the hallway. We can think of always, only half the time. If all was in order we wouldn’t even call each other. You’re halfway down the road next to neighborhood lamps. We can meet them later, throwing half our stones at electricity and half at curbed water. We can think it’s really happening, but the lamps are only halfway there. While we’re indoors though, let’s just throw our happenings into time. Let’s just drink the shadows in the hallways. We can think of order while we turn on half of each other. Maybe it will happen if we don’t worry. Maybe it will fall on us like that stream down by your house.

From Philip Levine: “…squeal / and shit like a new housewife // discovering television, / or that I’ll turn like a beast / cleverly to hook his teeth / with my teeth.”

Eric Elshtain, “Early Maneuvers, Closing Matters”

In the next face you make a thought
out of near. You use language
to ignore collapsing. Our footprints
are the same in the fourth moment
of the gallop. Call family the same thing
in real time proper for moral concern.
Become the cinema of results. Disarticulate
the arm inflecting to the left
the gathered there. Title it Gerund
Somebody. Point the commotion
last of which has not been screened;
only instants. Stints at the ready,
sorties at the eyes away to the reason
to find another father for the man whose fingers
frame the air: he’s a plastic sidewalk.
What he thought occurred, so we all sing
about meeting ourselves.
Wave. Open the hatchet is a horizon to care for
without telescopes. We cannot shadow the look
addictable to origin. This scriptless
will be about subsidence. It will become
the centerpiece of a belief.
You have every reason – you’re
Making yourself in a reality unmaking.

Riff Off His Work (You're not alone in thinking this doesn't make a lot of sense)

In the outstretched arm you face, you make a thinking stance hidden. You use anguish to adore masking. Our bracelets are the same in the sixth sense of a flamboyant smell of sympathy. Call your family before you call mine the same thing. If that cinema we crop for fruit says it’s somebody, point back to its muddied, muddled, report card. Title it backwards and hand it through the chute. Every script screens its own instant, or instance. Its own imprint is ready for an identity switch, a mismatched finger print, probably. Send me every reason you can about the origin of our mailbox. I don’t care whether or not I wear your robe or mine to pluck our foreign letters. You have every play-piece from the chess-set. Give me those back before the telescope stops hatching beliefs we don’t have.

From Bruce Bond - "Dear happiness, forgive me; / You are not what I make histories of"

My Riff Off His Work:

Dear history, forgive yourself; you are not what I make happiness of. The happiness in a shoebox, perky by my bed, sings itself to sleep in the blue winter, saying goodbye to its own history. Rather, dear shoebox, for you are that who etches in a history without shoes, reminding us of yesterday's forgiveness coming out of you. When our beds of winter dress the summer in April's fake snow, it's a dear of a sight, a shoe sized for a blue history. Dear reminders of our own etching, here's my bed. History is a bed of no size at all. Forgive me for baffling you, and forgive yourself for strands of hair that become bleached by a sun of winter-shoes that don't fit. The hair of history is tripping at our heels, and our heels can't fit into yesterday's shoebox. Last summer, when I begged my own bed to give me forgiveness, it only reminded me of how I make happiness out of singing goodbye.

From Gertrude Stein:

The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

My Riff Off Her Work:

The smell of rain is long, and the green of trees is calm outside. The water patting this roof never fails to make me almost tired. The white corner-chair is long, and the likelihood of it being comfortable makes me want to bathe in laughs—a fountain of one hundred snickers. The swell of screams from the train is drawn soundless on green of the fence. Winter tapping our roof never fails to wake me when I’m nearly sleeping. The white blanket over each patch of grass makes me want to take a bath in a fountain of one hundred springs. Last spring, when the smell of my corner-chair was uncomfortable, I went to sleep on top of the train. I woke up with rain in my face, patting my paper-thin eye-lids, and I nearly snickered but I was calm outside. The water on the roof of the train. The smell of everything green. The likelihood of nearly longing. Patches of puddles where there used to be snow. This was my bath—the stuff of the skies tapping on my head, coming in hundreds.

A Mown Lawn
by: Lydia Davis

She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grow long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

My Papa’s Waltz
by: Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

My Riff Off His Work:


LOST THINGS
by: Lydia Davis

They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a certain ring, one a certain button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am.

My Riff Off Her Work